I don't know why I didn't think of this before. I've done nothing with this problem because the only alternative I could think of was to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch. That would mean reloading the MacOS as well as all my programs. The time involved was just too much. But last night I dawned on me that I could create a new account, let it run overnight and see what I got in the morning. As I suspected, there was no error message this morning in the new account.

So all I'm doing now is moving a few folders from the old account to the new account and then I don't have to see that error message every morning. I'll keep the old account on the Mac for a month or so just in case I've forgotten to move something I need.

Done.

Yeah, but now you don't get a new Mac.

You underestimate the power of Santa! Something tells me this Mac might end up in my wife's stocking while Santa leaves me a new MacBook. Don't you just love Santa?

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.

You underestimate the power of Santa! Something tells me this Mac might end up in my wife's stocking while Santa leaves me a new MacBook. Don't you just love Santa?

Do you have Santa's email address? I think I might be ending up in his spam folder. The last time I left him cookies, they were the computer kind, not the culinary kind. I haven't heard from him since.

Something else I just noticed since creating a new account on my MacBook... a couple of problems in Photos have disappeared. It was easy to work around these problems with a mouse click or two so I didn't think much of it. And Safari had started acting stupid but not stupid enough to get worked up over things. Again, just a mouse click or two and I was back on track. But since creating and using a new account both Photos and Safari are acting the way they're supposed to act.

Over time I must have accidentally changed a setting here and there that made Safari and Photos act in ways I don't want them to act and by starting fresh with a new account everything was set back to original defaults. I guess cleaning house with a new account every so often isn't a bad idea. This reminds me of the bad old days when I had to use Windows at work so I did the same at home just to avoid conflicting operation systems. Windows was so awful through and including Windows 95 that every six months I would reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows as well as my programs and personal files. All you had to do around a Windows PC was look at it and some file(s) would get corrupted causing problems galore. Windows XP wasn't as bad but when I was finally able to move to a Mac in 2002 all that nonsense went away. Creating a new account is nothing like erasing the HD and starting from scratch but it did cause a neuron or two to fire and remind me of the bad old days.

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.

Is it as easy as dragging your folders? I seem to remember in the past that you couldn't do that, and had to jump through hoops.

I was too casual with my language. While in my old account I copied what I wanted to a USB drive. Then I logged in to the new account and moved the files from the USB drive to where I wanted them in the new account. I didn't actually drag-and-drop from one account to the other while both were open. I don't think you can do that. For that matter I don't know how to have two accounts open at the same time. And to be precise when I say account I mean user. I created a new user account and used a USB drive to move files from one to the other.

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Always burn your bridges. You never know who's coming up from behind.